A 274-year-old plantation along the Combahee River in Beaufort County with ties to Robert E. Lee and Frank Lloyd Wright recently sold for $9 million.
The 1,851-acre Old Combahee Plantation had been on the market for over a year with an initial asking price of $11 million. The most recent asking price was $9.5 million.
Once used for indigo and rice production, the property has most recently been used as a hunting preserve and for timber harvesting. The Nature Conservancy holds a conservation easement on the property, which is located in the ACE Basin, a watershed of the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers. The ACE Basin is one of the largest areas of undeveloped wetlands and uplands on the Atlantic Coast.
Before there was an Old Combahee the Yemassee Indian Wars took place there and troops traversed the area during the American Revolution.
Then came the Civil War.
“Lee established a network of earthen forts with cannon to protect against Union forces invading from Beaufort, South Carolina,” the listing said. “Two forts remain on the property.”
Also on the property are the remnants of an old mill and dwellings of enslaved people.
In 1938 Michigan industrial engineer C. Leigh Stevens assembled a 4,000-acre tract including the Old Combahee land and hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design a working estate including a main house, cabins, barns, aviary and guest house.
He called it Auldbrass.
Both Stevens and Wright died before the project was completed.
Stevens’ daughter Jessica Stevens Loring inherited the land and ultimately sold the Auldbrass property after putting it on the National Register of Historic Places. She kept Old Combahee. Her descendants have owned the land ever since.
The rustic wood-sided plantation house is on a bluff overlooking a tributary of the Combahee. The property includes 4 miles of riverfront and is on the Atlantic flyway.
Deer and turkey are plentiful.
“Depending on the tides both freshwater and saltwater fish can be caught in the thousands of acres of flats and creeks along the river,” the listing said.
Old rice fields remain and bottomland is forested with hardwoods and pine.
Chip Hall of Plantation Services in Charleston brokered the deal.